Second floor

Over the weekend I spent a good amount of time priming and sanding the second floor walls.  And then my sweet husband helped me glue them all together because I wanted them square and he knows how to get the job done!

It's a good thing the landing is completely enclosed. 
Now you can't see that I made the stairs too high!

Yesterday, while I was unknowingly gluing the siding upside down onto the front panel of the house, some little people moved into the house!

When it's too hot to cook inside, move the kitchen outside!

 

Looks like some lucky person is going to get breakfast in bed.

 

I wonder what these girls are talking about.

Doors and More Doors

Well for the past couple of weeks I've been making doors, doors, doors.  Unfortunately, I forgot how I made the kitchen door so I had to figure it out again. Here's what I did.

The DOOR FRAME was cut from 3/16" thick basswood. I cut my pieces 3/8"W because that is the depth of my walls.  The top and bottom pieces are 1 5/16" long.  The sides are 3 3/8" long.  I glued it together and laid it on my cutting grid to see if it was square.

The DOOR pieces were cut from1/32" basswood.  Here are the pieces I cut for one door:
1 door base: 1 5/16"W x 3 6/32" H
4 vertical pieces (2 for each side of the door): 5/32" W x 3 6/32" H
10 horizontal pieces (5/side): 5/32" W x 15/16" L. You will need 2 more for the bottom strips but I waited to cut those until everything else was glued in.  That way if I needed to adjust the width I could.  Not that all my other measurements and cuts weren't always spot-on.  Ahem.
10 panels (5/side): 15/16" H x 7/16" D.  I sanded the edges of these by holding each side of the panel at an angle and sanding it down on an old nail file.

Done!  Now flip it over and repeat on the other side.
 

5 doors and door frames ready for installation.  Well, almost.  They just need to be painted.  Oh, yeah - and hinged.

Floors and Stairs

After installing the flooring in the dining room and living room, I had some scraps left that really weren't going to work upstairs anywhere.  I decided to use them for the kitchen instead of tiling it. The printed paper tiles just didn't look right.  I had been going around and around about this kitchen.  When I first started the house, my plan had been to make the house as historically accurate as possible.  But when I compared the dollhouse plans to the real plans in the Sears catalog, I saw the kitchen layout was totally different.  The back left wall is meant to have a doorway opening up into a closet pantry. It was under the stairs and had an exterior door on the left.  To keep it accurate I would have had to add that, along with a drop down ironing board next to it.  Then I would have had to glue the sink and cabinets to the removable wall.  This is only the second house I have ever made and thinking about it was making my head hurt.  I decided since it was a kit house, theoretically the family could have decided not to do any of that, and the whole kitchen could have been completely updated at some point. 

After I resolved all that, I installed the stairs in the living room and made a fireplace following Otterine's fireplace tutorial, only halving the measurements.  For my fireplace, I cut strips of wood for the sides and scribed them.  I cut a piece of wood to go along the top and notched it all along the side to create part of the dental molding.  I glued a piece of cove molding on top of that.  For the circle pattern in the corner blocks I used a spring hammer from an eyelet setting kit.

Fireplace close up

Rethinking the floors

After I finished the bricks, I redid the floors.  I was really unhappy with them.  There were big gaps where I had fit the sheets of basswood together.  I ended up ripping it all out and ordering real dollhouse flooring.

Dining room floor before

 

Dining room floor after

I was really happy with the floors after I had them installed.  In retrospect, I think the original floors would have been fine if I had laid them with the boards going sideways and had left off the shellac...  

1/2" Scale Lamp

I know it seems like I am cruising along on this house, but the reality is, I started working on this house last April.  I want to post everything I've done on the house, so at for the time being my posts are rather like flashbacks.

Last fall, I signed up for a swap to celebrate the anniversary of the half scale yahoo group I am on.  I have never signed up for a swap before. I was really excited about it!  After everyone was signed up, I found myself committed to making 47 shabby chic minis!  Yikes!  I wracked my brains and spent a lot of time on Pinterest for several weeks trying to come up with an idea.  I finally came up with an idea and a prototype.

The base is made up of a jewelry finding with crystals and a bead glued on top.  I cut the lampshade out of paper and glued white fabric to it.  The flowers are French knots.  It took me several months to complete all 47.  A lot of that time was spent hitting every craft store in town trying to find enough of the base parts to do all the lamps!

Bricking the Puritan

I started creating bricks for the foundation of the Puritan following  George the Mini guy's brick tutorial.  His bricks look awesome!  I think mine look pretty good considering I've never made anything like that before.

A tub full of bricks

  I made a few mistakes I need to make note of in case I ever decide I want to handcut another 500+ miniature bricks.  I cut all the brick measurements in half, but was not thinking about needing to use a thinner board too.  As a result, I had a really difficult time keeping my x-acto knife perpendicular while cutting all the way through those teensy, tiny bricks.  Between that and my not completely spot-on measuring, my bricks came out a little wonky looking.  I painted the sides of the bricks gray instead of adding grout.

It took a LOOOONG time to make all those bricks.  When I finally got them all done, I was ready to have a party.  A gluing party!  I was so excited to get them on the house and see how it looked all together.

Close up of bricks

The Puritan after adding the bricks

 



Making the Wood Floors

The next thing I did was the floors for the dining room and living room.  I scribed the floorboards into basswood and stained the boards.  I glued them in running front to back since I read that is how floorboards in real houses are done.  Then I cut door trim for the dining room.  Unfortunately, I didn't buy all the doors and windows when I first started the house.  The interior door openings were all cut for Bauder Pine doors which, as far as I can tell, aren't being made anymore.  I had no idea how to make french doors, so the doorway between the dining room and living room is open.  But I braved up and made the door into the kitchen from scratch!

Starting the Kitchen

I started with the kitchen.  In Googling images of 1930's tiles I came across a beautiful kitchen that I wanted to try to recreate.  It had penny tiles with black flowers on it.  I found a hex pattern on the internet and shrunk it down, printed it out on photo paper and colored the flowers in with a Sharpie.  I built the kitchen cabinets following the instructions in "A Cabinetmaker's Guide for Dollhouse Furniture Volume 8, Half-Inch Scale Furniture."

1/2" Scale Puritan

In the May 1991 issue of Nutshell News Frank Moroz wrote detailed instructions on how to build a miniature Sears Kit House called the Puritan.  For some reason, I have long had a interest in the 1920's and 1930's and the idea of having a dollhouse from that era appealed to me.  So I appealed to my better half and begged him to make it for me!  He cut out all the pieces and started to assemble them.  Then, quite honestly, I'm not sure what happened.  It all ended up in a box for quite some time.  Every now and again I would pull it all out, trying to fit it together and envision it.  And then I would put it all away. Recently, I pulled it all out and actually began to work on it again.  This is basically what I started with.